Tag: algolia

Magento 2 has never been ultra-fast. Even with careful customisation and not a very large catalog, it still takes somewhere near 2s to render the average category view page. This slowness is usually made better by the full page cache, but navigation and filtering patterns are too different to hope that in a browsing session, a user will hit only cached pages.

Now, 1s-2s server-side generation time is not too bad. But more and more merchants expect an almost-instant browsing experience. Magento is hard at work with the PWA implementation, which should deliver a very smooth experience, but that’s still in progress. And when it’s done, time will be needed for the extension vendors to catch up. In my opinion, all the approaches for Magento PWA, either official or community based, call for a big implementation budget.

And here comes Algolia. Stop now and go here, check the load speed as you filter through the left-hand navigation. Almost instant.

Algolia is a search service. They integrate with Magento via an open source module. Basically, it will replace all your search and category pages with an empty catalog page that at load time, will do a client-side call to Algolia, get a json-formatted list of products, then use html templates that are under your control to render the results. So the initial page load time includes Magento bootstrapping (which should be under 500ms), plus a few hundred milliseconds for the Algolia call. Even better, the navigation is ajax-based, so any further filtering is almost instant. Of course, they also have very relevant (and customisable) search results.

That’s a huge selling point for me. While I still have to deal with performance issues on product detail pages, cart and checkout, using Algolia makes catalog navigation ultra-fast. And it takes a lot of load from the server, since we don’t process the catalog there.

All this sounds great, but there are a few reasons for which you may not be able to use it.

It is a paid service. Their pricing scheme is good though, I am almost positive the increase in conversion rate will pay off. Not to mention the countless hours you’d spend in trying to optimize the catalog page, if you get to that point.

It is a SaaS. You are fully dependent on them. When I was working on a project, my free trial ended and the site instantly became unusable. That got me thinking that an Algolia outage will break my site. But they look well funded and have a great uptime.

If you have an existing project, it’s way harder to move to Algolia. Since they replace all templates on the catalog pages, any skinning/custom features will be gone. Of course you can re-do them using their templates, but it will mean a lot more than just installing the Algolia module. Don’t expect any community extension that touches the category page to work out of the box either.

I also had to customise Algolia a bit and luckily, there are options. Roughly, the module works by creating a product indexer that pushes data to Algolia. Via the admin, you get to decide what attributes are searchable, filterable etc. All changes to products will be pushed at indexing time. When rendering the results, you have access to the json and can render them as you wish using html and a proprietary markup language.

Overall, it’s very easy to change CSS styling and add more attributes or custom logic, but you should be aware that at render time, you don’t have access to the product collection, so you cannot call Magento for any logic. Or well, I guess you could, but it defeats the purpose of using Algolia. The only approach should be to send any data you need at index time (even precalculate some attributes if needed), then simply display them in the templates. Algolia has you covered for default more complex features, like different pricing per customer group, but I can see how things could get complicated if you have custom logic in displaying data based on the current customer’s session. Still doable though.

All in all, Algolia is in my top 3 recommendations for a new Magento 2 project. It’s also in the top 3 recommendations for websites that have performance issues. I do hope that Magento will provide a similar experience based on elasticsearch once PWA is finalised, but till then Algolia is one of the best integrations you can have for your store.